


it starts with dying

by kuro49



Category: Batman - All Media Types, DCU
Genre: Bottom Jason Todd, Deepthroating, Face-Fucking, Guardian Angels, M/M, Wingfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-31
Updated: 2019-08-31
Packaged: 2020-08-13 07:55:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,213
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20170813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kuro49/pseuds/kuro49
Summary: Jason dies the way he does (beaten then blown up). Dick keeps on living the way he does (hand in hand with danger and near death at every turn).What's different here is that Jason comes back into Dick's life changed, he comes back to him with wings.





	it starts with dying

**Author's Note:**

  * For [naol](https://archiveofourown.org/users/naol/gifts).

> lots of peeps to thank but none that i can mention without making this fic even more obvious than it is that i wrote it. (now that reveal is out: special thanks to stevie, lu, and anne who got me writing wingfic of all fics even though I thought I would never try, and all my thanks to crooked for the beta :'DDDD)
> 
> to my recipient: i can't write a guardian angel/wing fic to save my life and this probably shows. so i threw in some power bottom jay for compensation ;)

[743](http://www.asofterworld.com/index.php?id=743). There should be a word for a threat that is also a promise. Because that is what I want you to hold me down and do. (I love you)

i. Do no harm, I say. Or less harm, you guess, if choices must be made. (The hard decisions are more often than not already made.)

Dick is falling.

No safety lines, no nets, just the ground coming up at him from so many floors down.

It probably says quite a bit about himself when he can tell you that this is a familiar feeling, the sensation of a hollow drop at the bottom of his gut. His heart is at his throat. His pulse is a thundering thing. And it’s difficult to get air inside his lungs even as his mouth parts on a gasp, even when the wind is rushing by his ears as he goes backwards against the cracked windows. His shoulders take the brunt of the impact as he makes that break, glass shattering beneath the full force of his body’s weight. 

Dick is on the precipice of the fall when he sees _ him_.

A dead boy in a grown ghost.

A beaten then blown up soul as an apparition with wings that barely span the width of his outstretched arms.

Dick blinks behind his domino mask, the blue tips of his fingerstripes grazing at the edge of a feather. A damning flutter of those wings and it has the tell-tale quiver of Dick's heart following in double time. _Little wing, _ he thinks he says, breathing coming out in a garbled attempt when cottoned in confusion, tongue too thick in his mouth. Abandoning gravity as he does even if it always catches up, Dick just keeps on falling. 

It is with conviction that he knows.

That’s Jason who just pushed him out of the window of a fifteen-storey tall apartment.

It is a wild tumble for a landing, his grappling gun shot out at the last possible second, and Dick dislocates his shoulder for the efforts. He’s done it before and he’ll do it again but it still hurts like something special.

“Huh.”

Jason, and holy fucking _ Batman_, that's Jason alright when he is capable of packing that much punch into a single syllable. It isn’t warped or distant or any other variation that Dick can blame on a head wound as Jason comes down in front of Dick. Black hair curling at the ends where it falls into his eyes. Jason is considering him, gaze even, holding steady. Dick watches transfixed as Jason’s bare feet land over the cracks of the ground, dropping down to sit on his haunches while his elbows prop up on his knees. 

"So, this is what it takes." Jason fixes a quick smile at Dick, like this isn't an entirely bizarre circumstance to be in. "I know you've always been one for dramatic flairs, Dickie, but I didn't think I'd have to go this far to get you to finally see me."

Dick doesn't understand plenty, least of all this. Jason in his death still smells of cigarette smoke. The same brand that he liked when he was Robin, sneaking one cancer stick burnt down to the filter to be replaced with another, the nicotine wafting across his skin until it seeped beneath that. It makes Dick breathe in on a deep inhale. On scent memory alone, he is remembering what he never really had before he lost him.

Dick has never once believed in divine intervention but there might be something to it when Jason has quite literally descended in front of him with wings fanned out from the stretch his back. Dick's fingers clutch uselessly at his thigh as he fights to simply reach out and touch the kid that's grown into something else entirely.

“I could’ve died.” 

“I’m precisely why you didn’t.” Jason pulls his lips into a thin line, like he is almost mad at that fact, saying. "But if it was up to me, I'd shoot you myself."

The man up in that apartment is a convicted criminal on multiple accounts of domestic violence and assault charges. The man is also on conditions to not be in possession of any weapons. But he had a gun and he was more than willing to pull the trigger. One dead vigilante in a city as grim as Blüdhaven doesn’t amount to anything more than one more smear staining the asphalt. 

Dick hasn’t lost any blood but he feels like he could be in shock.

Jason tips his head to the side, considering once more, his eyes blinking slow, and it's like he agrees too when the blue-green of those eyes remain bright in the dark.

"Need a hand with that?" Jason asks, finally, nodding at Dick's shoulder and Dick is reminded of what his body feels keenly.

"I," Dick starts, shaking his head, wincing as a result to tell Jason. "I'll be fine."

Dick gets up. Like he always does, pulling himself from his slump on the ground to sit upright, crossing his legs in the process as he breathes deep breaths. This too is familiar, the muscle tension bleeding out in droplets, his mind forced into tranquility as he closes his eyes behind his domino mask. One hand massaging the other, he is relaxed to a level that is near docile when he manipulates the Cunningham Technique to be done by just one person, and sets his dislocated shoulder back inside its socket.

The relief is near palpable, and when he opens his eyes, there is Jason still in front of him.

“So, what’re you really supposed to be?” Dick asks, rotating his arm as he gets back up on his feet. He is feeling brave in the face of what has to be— and he stops abruptly because this is where he has no idea.

A product of his imagination. A vivid hallucination. A deep seeded regret in manifestation. Take his pick blind and he still has no clue as to what this is supposed to be. Jason looking older than when he died, Jason in nothing but a pair of worn old jeans, shredded at the knees. There are freckles scattered across his shoulders and a pointed autopsy scar over his torso even though Dick _knows_ one was never ordered when Bruce brought his body home from Ethiopia.

You don't need a cause of death when blunt force trauma and an explosion on top of that very well cements the how.

If this is a dream, Dick is selfish enough to admit he wants it to last even with all the bad reminders. Dick is holding on to this second look at Jason so tightly.

"I thought dead at first. But then I figured out death isn't that simple, it isn't just you rotting in the ground in peace." Jason says to him, not fading from his vision, not even going blurry at the edges. He is up from the ground and standing straight too. "Turns out, dead doesn't get you far at all. Dead gets you crawling out of your grave then turning around and seeing the ground undisturbed, not a speck of dirt out of place." Jason keeps going and it is the same tinge of Gotham in the twist of his words that puts solid weight into him being here at all. "Dead gets you not knowing why but still finding your way into this shithole of a city, Dick. Or _ fuck_," Jason lets out a scoff of a laugh and the sound is damn near pitiful, "maybe Blüdhaven is just hell on earth and you're really the devil that likes watching me try to save you and failing every fucking time.”

Dick opens his mouth, and he thinks he had words in his head he wanted to get out but. What _ can _you say to something like that?

If asked, Dick isn't so sure if he wants the truth. He has had Jason back for all of perhaps ten minutes and Dick already wants to confess that he really doesn't care for the truth if he gets to keep him here for good. Dick likes having Jason here even if he might not be real at all. Crazy, Dick thinks, doesn't mean all that much in a world like theirs. Even the certifiable ones have their good days. 

Jason snorts, crossing his arms over his chest as Dick clamps his mouth shut once more. Dick wonders whether Jason is just waiting until Dick breaks before giving up the real answer. 

“You have wings, Jay. You've got _ robin _ wings.” Dick says instead, fixating on that, the warm tones of red-orange at the base of Jason's wings the exact pattern to the common American robin, and he smiles this time because he is not the only one who sees the irony to that. Not when his little wing is scowling right back at him like he is swallowing down something particularly bitter. "And you're my guardian angel."

It might be the wrong conclusion but it is the same one they both come to.

ii. You remember none of the gory details because even the broader strokes hurt. (But then again, everything hurts.)

Dick pieces it altogether.

Like a set of puzzle he is finally wiping all the blood from to see the picture underneath, he is lying on his bed with Jason settling on the fire escape just outside of his bedroom window. Jason tells him he doesn't really sleep but it isn't like Dick does much of that either when he is picking at a loose thread on the edge of his pillowcase.

“The mugger at Mr Pickle Deli who stabbed me between the ribs. That was you.”

“Knife was aimed for your gut,” Jason tells him, easily, propping his chin up on his knees as he pulls them to his chest, “you can wait a bit for a collapsed lung but you don’t really have any time before you bleed out from a gut wound.”

Dick remembers the agonizing pain at the left side of his chest, the sharp spike of it made worse with every ragged inhale, and the increasing difficulty with each thin breath of air he can still pull in then release from out between gritted teeth. He remembers that trip to the doctor that is almost like his city's own Leslie Thompkins, except she is still in med school and studying to become a family physician instead of a surgeon. Dick touches a hand right between the sixth and seventh rib, sliding scarred fingertips against the raised edge of that particular scar.

“How about the broken collarbone from the Phraim Moore Housing Project?” The same one that put him out of commission for close to six weeks. Dick turns over so he is curled up on his side, watching Jason in the flickering street lights that leaves him looking sunken beneath the eyes, but he blinks and Jason stays. Like a very real thing.

“Did you want a severed carotid artery instead?” Jason quips back just as easily in return, turning his head to rest his cheek down against his knees.

It leaves the tangy egg yolk glow to outline his cheeks, cutting a sharper line than Dick remembers of the fifteen years old boy who was just picking up weight and building body mass with that. Jason's lashes are still long and thick, dark against the scatter of freckles across his cheeks. But his face has grown out to something a little sharper, a bit harsher when the round line of his jaw at fifteen is gone. 

As Dick drags himself home from his little tumble, he watches Jason pick a path through his bedroom like he knows it by heart. Follows the line of Jason's spine as he bends forward to unlatch the window before pulling it open like he's gone through this same motion a hundred thousand times before. The process looks like a habit.

And then Dick remembers his own, the one where he leaves his bedroom window open when he goes to sleep. Not every night and not on designated nights either but still enough times to make him believe a window left open when he gets home is perfectly normal, or so the excuse sits. He pulls out his phone and opens the security app to find that none of his Oracle-grade alarms have been activated. 

Reality only has so much bearings on what Jason can and cannot do, he is real and he is not, and Dick still cannot entirely consider himself out of the looney bin just yet.

So Dick asks, “that time near Melville Park.”

“The concussion would’ve been a hatchet to the skull.” Jason points out, his wings stretching out on both sides and it has Jason biting down on a very lovely sound before the grey flight feathers are curling back down and around his shoulders in a mockery of what could be a hug. "Closest thing you came to hearing me in actuality until now."

"I thought all that ringing in my ears was just a symptom of the concussion." Dick recalls, a half-smile tugging at the corner of his mouth because that was a rough night, like most nights where he finds himself left out in the dark, all alone in a city that doesn't want to be his. A ringing in his head, and it's like he could almost make out words from all that white noise. "You kept me awake all night."

Jason smiles at him with all his teeth. "Revenge for that time you took the Red Line North home and nearly got a broken nose for trying to break up a bar fight because you couldn't let people fucking be."

Dick smiles a sheepish smile because he remembers that dumb fight and the dumber black eye he got out of it when he finally stumbled home that night.

“How about tha—”

“Dickiebird, you really want to know all the times you almost died?” Jason doesn't let him continue and Dick has a pretty good idea why.

It’s been years since Jason died, and that is plenty of time for Dick to do as he likes. And what he likes, according to what Jason has probably seen of him just seems like a whole lot of recklessness and dares made on a whim of Death. He has been running on fumes for a lot longer than he recognizes.

“The answer’s a lot, isn’t it, Jay?”

Jason nods once, and that’s really enough. His expression near forlorn, and Dick has enough tact still in him not to directly ask if Jason wants to join him in his bed.

“Come inside and shut the window behind you.” Dick says instead because if his head wants to play games with him, then Dick will follow through to the very end. Dick stays curled on his side, his fingers spanning out against the cool sheets. Jason looks like he wants to but Dick can't trust himself not to read into what doesn't exist. Because Dick wants it too, he just isn't so sure his brain is all here to decipher a standalone truth where he gets to have Jason in his death. "It's cold." 

It's not. It's the middle of summer, it's sweltering on a good day. And today is a special kind of hot and humid that only supports the argument that Blüdhaven might really be hell on earth. 

“I told you, I don't need to sleep.” Jason answers but he already has one foot landing whisper-soft against the bedroom floor, the slide of the window closing behind him before he latches the lock on it properly. Just the way he would if this is his home.

"Then do what you always do, Jay." Dick pats the side of the bed where it is empty, lets himself memorize the outline Jason cuts in the dark of his bedroom. He is terrified that when he opens his eyes to look for Jason, he won’t see him again. Looking right through him in place of at him. Or worse, looking right at him and finding he’s never been here to start with. "Watch over me."

Dick wishes he never has to sleep again if it means getting to extend this moment into something a lot like forever. 

He watches as Jason settles gingerly on the other side of the bed, on top of the covers and not making a single wrinkle over the sheets. It leaves Dick with all of his reservations on closing the distance, reaching out and breathing out but doesn't put his hand down against Jason's. Dick doesn't want the first to be their last. He doesn’t think he can have Jason's image dissolve altogether beneath his fingertips like a mirage just stretching thin against the horizon on a brutally sunny day.

Dick holds in on an inhale, looking up at Jason until he takes that option from him.

Jason turns his palm up and slides it underneath Dick's hand, his touch like static electricity. Jason's fingers don't go through him and it gets Dick turning the brush of their skin into a desperate grasp, his exhaustion bleeding through every crack and blemish when he makes one more request. 

“Don’t go again.”

"I barely even left that first time.” Jason's answer comes, slow and stiff and small like he is terrified too. Like Dick will look back for a second time and find nothing in his place. “I promise I won't, pretty bird."

Only then does Dick closes his eyes.

iii. It's not a marathon, it's a hunt. Give chase with death biting at your ankles. (I hope you wore your good shoes today.)

Dick wakes up.

Slow and warm with his head still in a fog. He is thinking of plumage, a lovely red-orange fading out into grey. He is thinking of black hair and blue-green eyes, scars across a body grown out through time he never really got to live. Dick opens his eyes and sees all of that. He blinks and the actuality of Jason Todd with _ wings _ in his bed doesn't fade.

"Need a hand with that?"

Dick doesn’t get up but he does keep blinking, breathing out with the same shock and awe. "_Jason._"

"Up and at 'em, Dick." Jason just looks amused, his eyes shifting to drag down lower deliberately, and there is really no hiding it. "And Dickie."

Dick flushes because Jason in his head is an untarnished memory. A kid in his Robin colours smoking up a storm with a smart mouth that quips and quips and quips until he gets a _ yes _ out of Dick.

This is the secret that Dick never allows himself to think about, nothing more than in passing and what-ifs that he does not entertain even on some of the worst nights in his life.

The secret being a first date set for a day that never came. Jason sitting next to the gargoyle he always had a strange affinity for while Dick took a seat right next to him. Even with his eyes hidden behind his domino mask, Jason's blush went from the tip of his ears all the way down to beneath the collar of his Robin uniform. He didn’t stammer but his fingers twitched like he was craving a smoke, and Dick laughed when Jason finally got the question out.

Dick laughed but he also said _ yes _ when asked, extracting a promise from Jason that he would make a genuine attempt to quit smoking and set a _ date _ date for after Jason's sixteenth birthday. They were five months out from the day then, adding a clause to the promise not barring any vigilante emergency or Titans mission. It was a promise Dick intended to keep and the first real kind of secret they kept when Batman never even knew.

Only Jason never got the chance to turn sixteen.

"This is more of the kind of welcome back I was hoping for." Jason tells him and then he is moving on the bed, this time shifting the sheets and dragging them off of Dick.

Dick swallows hard, watching again. The shift in those robin wings is magnificent, a simple stretch of them outwards before being drawn back to settle against the broad line of Jason's shoulders. The curtains left open from last night has the grey flight feathers looking near translucent along the edges with the sun back-lighting them. Dick wants to say his name a hundred thousand times, he settles for breathing out _ Jay _ on a momentous sigh instead.

The wicked pull at both corners of Jason's mouth is all the warning Dick gets because Jason is running both palms up against Dick's legs, knees to the inside of his thighs, and shoving them until there is enough room between them for himself. The sensation is pins and needles pricking across his skin, and Dick shivers with it as he pulls back to sit up fully on the bed while Jason settles down at the end. 

"Are you going to make me beg?" Jason asks, his hands at Dick's ankles and rubbing at the thin skin there with his thumbs. And it's distracting when Dick still can't quite decipher whether he is warmer or cooler to the touch or if he is focusing on all the wrong things right now, especially when Jason is close and aiming to come closer if Dick is reading all those same signs again.

Dick rubs a hand over his face, runs it through his hair, and faces a thorough defeat in a fight he is not one bit disappointed to forfeit. Dick doesn't know how it is possible but he has nearly forgotten how much he wants to be everything Jason wants of him. His answer is fixed around a roguish smile. "Not since you're asking so nicely."

"Good." Jason says with some finality, on his hands and knees and settling between Dick's legs. "Because I didn't die just to have you playing hard to get again."

Jason is teasing and Dick has no idea how to deal with that because he can treat him as though he is still Robin and he can treat him as though he is truly dead and gone but Jason is neither one of those things anymore.

"I wasn't playing hard to get," Dick protests, and there is some insistence on his virtues and maybe his own decency too. "You were fifteen, little wing, and the most I was willing to do was hold your hand if we'd actually went on that date."

Jason just waves him off, one finger hooking beneath the band of Dick's boxer shorts before he is drawing them down. His bright eyes gleaming something even brighter as he drags his cock out.

“We can still hold hands after this if you really want.” Jason offers before he is leaning down, mouth parting for the tip of his tongue to come peeking out.

Pink against the flushed red of Dick’s leaking cock.

Dick doesn't think any of the logistics add up when it comes to figuring out how it all works in death, with Jason affecting reality at turns then not but he is just a touch paranoid when he doesn't want to jinx any of this. He is also hardly thinking at all when it feels so fucking good. 

Jason is neither nice nor slow with it, Dick notes the way he is pushing at his own limits at every turn. Kissing up the length before he is wrapping the seam of his mouth around the head to swallow all of Dick down. His mouth burning like a flickering flame, feverishly hot and getting sloppy in the mess he makes. Jason isn't just giving him head, Jason is sinking down lower on every pass, the tip of Dick's cock dragging along his tongue to scrape against his hard palate then his soft before sinking into the back of his throat. 

Jason holds himself there, not moving an inch until there is a wet glint to his eyes and it is only then that he draws back by a bit. And Dick almost gets mad at himself for understanding what Jason wants from him. It's not said outright but Dick doesn’t need to hear it. Not when Jason is glancing up at him from beneath his lashes, eyes framed in a thick black flutter as he blinks away the tears. 

And Dick gives it to him because he wants this to be a promise he gets to keep no matter how small it is in the scheme of everything Jason has ever asked of him.

Dick reaches out, one hand touching Jason's jaw, tipping his head up another inch, makes the angle better for them both when it allows Dick to sink that last bit deeper inside of that mouth. He rubs a thumb along the corner of Jason's lips, stretched thin and looking downright obscene with its shiny red sheen. 

"Don’t think I won’t hold you to that, Jay."

He gets Jason whining, his eyes finally shuddering shut. The keen felt in vibrations in his throat, has Dick feeling it like a vice around his cock, and he nearly comes then and there, spilling with a white hot rush.

But Jason's request still sits between them, in whatever space that's left over.

Dick starts a pace, rocking his hips and fucking Jason's throat. It isn't anything brutal. He is careful and he keeps his eyes on Jason even though the bone white grip he has on the sheets beneath him is a pretty good indication that this is doing exactly as intended and hitting all of Jason's feel-good spots. When Dick reaches down with his other hand, he buries his fingers right into Jason's feathers. And if the initial whine was good, then this is all of that and _ more_.

Dick can read the line of Jason's spine as he shakes in pleasure, his feathers following in double time. The plumage is soft, is warmest at the base where they extend out of his shoulder blades. They shift and move and flutter and Jason's wings look and feel like the most alive thing in this room.

Dick has been on edge for a while now, hard not to be when he has Jason's soft wet mouth wrapped around his cock, his throat a vice at the head and his face blotchy with tears. Just before he comes, Jason digs a hand into Dick's hip, not allowing Dick to pull back and keeping him right where he is as he is coming down Jason's throat, leaving a mess all across his tongue to spill down his chin when he doesn't swallow in time.

It is only then that he lets Dick draw back just enough to ease the fit of his softening cock from between his lips.

Dick doesn't move his hands though, leaves them digging firmly into the depths of Jason's feathers. Running his fingers until they are rumpled and ruffled before he caresses them until they are all smoothed out once more. 

Jason is biting his lip, looking like he wants to make quite a few choice noises at the way Dick can't seem to stop touching his wings. He says, instead. "You've only been able to hear me for a day and you already want me to shut up."

Dick never really thought about this, didn't ever think he would get to experience this. But the rasp to Jason's voice sounds like the best fucking thing, he fights to bite down a grin. "Did you want it any other way, little wing?"

Maybe it's the nickname again but it gets Jason blinking, flushing a lovely red, pausing for one long second where Dick feels like he is holding his breath before Jason shakes his head in the negative.

Dick smiling as he breathes out. "Good."

Jason's wings seem to be preening at that single word, a flap that shakes out the grey flight feathers all the way down to the tips.

Dick could debate himself down to the very last argument that makes this the bad decision that it probably is. But he leans in and he broadcasts his intention with a tilt of his head to the side.

Jason looks a good portion lost and a fair part confused before the dawning realization of what Dick is asking for has his eyes widening, pupils dilated until there are just thin rings of blue-green blinking back at him. "Wait, you mean—"

"I can say it if I'm not being clear enough."

Jason shakes his head, reaches out with one hand and snags it into the fabric of Dick's worn tee. Dick feels the weight of that grip, the give of his shirt beneath the curl of Jason's fingers.

"No, don't." Jason tells him, his voice dropping low and quiet and his nerves stand out, "you're good."

Jason swallows hard and Dick's eyes track that.

It might be a bit of lady luck, or a great big dose of fate. Hell, it could be something else altogether but it isn't like Dick is about to let this go. He thinks briefly of going slow and soft, gentle in the way he presses forward on an angle, but he only just got Jason back. He refuses to go easy on Jason on a technicality that this is their first kiss.

When he closes that last bit of distance between them, Dick kisses Jason _ hard_. 

Dick parts his mouth into the kiss, touches his tongue to Jason's and swallows down that low whine Jason lets out from past his scraped-out throat. It's tender and warm, and Dick can taste his own release against the slide of Jason's tongue. Bitter and salty and not something he thought he would enjoy but extracted from the flat of Jason's tongue, all of it rushes to Dick's head like a cloudy fever dream he still has a hard time thinking this isn't.

Leaving him wondering how he ever went without.

Jason is the first to draw back, even if the motion is lined in reluctance, the tinge to his cheeks almost as bright as the red of his swollen lips. He presses the back of his hand to his mouth but Dick still manages to catch the smile by the way the corners of Jason's eyes crinkle. It is a small thing but it is all of those little details Dick has been missing all this time.

There is no halo hanging over the crown of his head but the sunlight catching at the dark curls almost gives off the same illusion. With his wings draping across his shoulders, the sight of him is damn near ethereal.

"Stay," Dick tells him, untangling Jason’s hand from his shirt to bring it to his lips. This time limiting himself to just one chaste kiss left lingering against the palm, "I'm going to get you some water."

He has no idea if Jason drinks, or if he _ can _ drink. But maybe Dick can find out. 

When Dick gets up off the bed, he doesn't turn around for a second look.

**Author's Note:**

> so there is a vaguely thought out extended version (that was never going to make the due date) where dick goes back to gotham and digs up jason's grave, which leads to dick discovering it is empty so with guardian angel jason tagging along, they go looking for jason's body. it puts them on talia's trail, and it turns out brain dead jason's consciousness is guardian angel jason, so when brain dead jason gets thrown into the lazarus pit, guardian angel disappears from dick's side and jason comes back to life for good. cue super happy sappy ending just the way i like it.
> 
> i say i'd write this one day but uhhhhh i make no promises.


End file.
